Adler is carrying out a pilot project involving two Tory robots that it purchased, one for use within its store in the city of Erfurt and the other at the store located at its corporate headquarters in Haibach. The company plans to expand the deployment to other stores later this year. Adler, which already attaches passiveEPCGen 2 ultrahigh-frequencyRFID tags to most merchandise it sells, has been using handheld readers at all of its 177 stores for some time, says Roland Leitz, the company's head of IT. Compared with manual or barcode-based inventory checks, he adds, checking inventory via RFID handhelds "speeds up stocktaking significantly." However, Leitz notes, because the process requires that an employee walk through store aisles and past shelves, waving the reader at nearby items, "it is manual work that ties up capacities of staff."
